Englishy Date Translations

[cidaris]

I am working on a way to convert "3rd Sunday in March" and "2nd Friday in April" kind of dates to something a machine can use. I have the -long- code to do it, using arrays and math, but I was looking for a module somewhere?
The few that I'm familiar with don't seem to do this kind of thing.
I've used Date::Calc and things like that, and are comfortable with them, but I guess I just don't know what to call this kind of classification to look further.

Thanks,
cidaris

[fglock]

Date::Tie can do the math part:

use strict;
use Date::Tie;

tie my %date, "Date::Tie";
# 3rd Sunday in March
$date{month} = 3;    # march is 3
$date{day} = 1;      # start counting form march first
$date{weekday} = 7;  # monday is 1, sunday is 7
$date{week} += 2;    # advance 2 weeks
print "3rd Sunday in March is $date{month}-$date{day}\n";

# 2nd Friday in April
$date{month} = 4;    # april is 4
$date{day} = 1;      # start counting form april first
$date{weekday} = 5;  # monday is 1, friday is 5
$date{week} += 1;    # advance 1 week
print "2nd Friday in April is $date{month}-$date{day}\n";

Output:

3rd Sunday in March is 03-17
2nd Friday in April is 04-12

update: Date::Tie is fast

[merlyn]

I believe Date::Manip will slowly convert those strings just as you've written them into something useful.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

[artist]

Hi
You can also look at Parse::RecDescent modules if you have to go further than currently available date modules

Artist